Constant Contact Website Builder
Constant Contact is a website builder that aims to make the creation of your personal online presence quick and easy. You start by describing your business. As you type in a few keywords in the ‘Category’ field on the left of the page, you’ll see the right side change to offer you a preview of your homepage, with sections and royalty-free photos appearing instantly.
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The service makes use of the Unsplash royalty-free image gallery so you don’t even need to take photos yourself – unless you really want to of course. It's touted as creating fast loading web pages, offers an online store, built-in analytics, pre-designed layouts, blogs, visual effects, and more. And to top it all off, you can check it out for free without handing over your credit card details.
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Plans and prices
Constant Contact has two email marketing plans and one main website building plan. There’s also an option where you can try Constant Contact for an unlimited time for free. The free option comes with an SSL Certificate, which is really nice and pretty rare for a website builder.
The first email marketing plan is called Email. It starts at $20.00 per month and includes hundreds of templates, lots of features for tracking and reporting, the ability for ecommerce, and the domain to your own custom website. Because of all these features, Constant Contact is more than just a website builder: it’s a marketing tool for businesses. On your own website, there’s room for a blog, unlimited storage, and access to your website’s analytics. There’s lots of options for you to grow your business using the Email plan.
The next plan, called Email Plus, includes everything in the Email plan and additional features. It costs $45.00 per month (to start) and provides advanced ecommerce marketing tools, surveys, polls, coupons, and even an option for online donations. Instead of having up to three users, this plan includes up to 10. The transaction fee for ecommerce is the same on both this plan and the Email plan (1.5%). All of the website hosting features remain the same.
The Website Builder plan costs $10.00 per month. This plan comes with ecommerce features, unlimited storage, an SSL Certificate, and SEO tools. However, this plan doesn’t include any email capabilities. You can still run advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, but you won’t be able to send out a monthly newsletter by email. If you’re interested in running your business online and marketing on different platforms, then this plan is a great option for a reasonable price.
Interface
The interface is easy to navigate and the support center is very helpful if you have questions on how to get started. There’s a lot to explore, and especially if you’re new to website building - if the quick tutorial you’ll see at the start isn’t enough information, you can always check out the FAQ section or ask someone in the support center directly. You can either chat with an advisor or browse through the knowledgebase. We went down the latter route and found the instructions clear and easy to follow, and there were numerous screenshots to help you understand everything.
Features
The ability you’ll have to customize your website is one of Constant Contact’s strongest features. Customizing your web pages is truly easy. Type on a text field and basic text editing options are available to enable you to change your font’s color and style, as well as being able to add or remove web links.
If you don’t like the default image Constant Contact chose for you, move your cursor over it to reveal three options. You can edit the image (which only allows you to zoom into it), embed a link within it (which can send the visitor to another one of your pages), or choose a different photo (from either Unsplash’s huge collection, or one of your own). Just like WordPress, any photo you add is placed in your site’s media library. This allows you to use the same image in different parts of your site without having to re-upload it multiple times.
Competition
Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign are all competitors to Constant Contact. However, not all email marketing and web hosting services offer a free plan for an unlimited time. ActiveCampaign has a 15 day free trial, but no plans lasting beyond that time period. If you want a web host you can use for free long-term, then Constant Contact has a great plan available with an SSL Certificate to ensure users they’re safe when they visit your website.
Final thoughts
Constant Contact offers you a great website hosting service for free with a nice interface and numerous features that are easy to use. As long as your blogging needs are on the simple side, and only need to sell three products, you may not even need to migrate to the paid service. However, if your website is growing and you want additional help with email marketing campaigns, or social media assistance, then you can always upgrade to the paid version.
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